Good Immigrants, Bad Immigrants

If there’s a familiar ring in President Trump’s order that the country welcome only those refugees who can “fully and appropriately assimilate,” perhaps it’s because it recalls a similar move more than a century ago, when the U.S. government began choosing immigrants selectively on the basis of their ancestry. 

In 1923, Congressman John Cable, an Ohio Republican, made a short visit to Ellis Island, saying his concern about immigrants was “from the standpoint of absorbing them into our farm and industrial life.” According to a New York Times account of his Ellis Island visit, Cable concluded that too many Jews were being let in. After reading the Times story, Rep. Emmanuel Celler, a Jewish Democrat from Brooklyn, fired off an angry letter to the editor, saying, “One set of people is as good as another.” Congress nevertheless proceeded in 1924 to pass the Johnson-Reed Act, establishing that immigration would henceforth be subject to national origin quotas, with an overwhelming number of slots reserved for people from Western Europe. People from elsewhere had scant chance to be admitted. The quotas effectively closed America’s doors to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, just as they faced rising Nazi persecution. 

Celler was still a member of Congress 40 years later, when he co-sponsored the landmark 1965 Immigration Act, which finally abolished the national origin quota system. President Lyndon B. Johnson called for that reform in his first State of the Union address. “A nation that was built by immigrants of all lands can ask those who now seek admission: ‘What can you do for our country?’” he said. “But we should not be asking, ‘In what country were you born?’”

Today, the focus is more on refugee admissions, but the arguments echo those from 60 years ago. The 1965 reform met vigorous opposition from immigration restrictionists who argued for maintaining the national origin quota system. Sen. John McClellan, an Arkansas Democrat, said abolishing the quotas would mean immigration in the coming years would “shift from those European countries that contributed most to the formation of this nation to the countries of Asia and Africa.” John Trevor Jr., whose eugenicist father was the guiding intellectual force behind the 1924 Act, offered a carefully crafted argument for the quota system, saying it  merely “holds a mirror up to the people now in the country and attempts to provide that the people who come in shall be a reflection of those who are already here.”

The 1965 Act was nonetheless approved with bipartisan support and opened the United States for the first time to immigrants of color. No other legislation or policy was more important in making the United States the diverse country it is today, and the ethnic transformation has been mostly harmonious. Progressives figured the old debates about assimilability had been settled. 

Not so. In a recent interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Vice President JD Vance argued that “social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly.” In practice, the Trump administration apparently sees a problem less in the number of immigrants coming as in where they’re coming from. Secretary of State Marco Rubio this past week told Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia that the United States has the right to “pick and choose” which refugee groups are acceptable for admission, saying, “Our foreign policy doesn’t require evenhandedness.” Even as Afghan, Cuban, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan refugees are being sent home, white English-speaking Afrikaner refugees from South Africa are being speedily and warmly received. Greeting the first group to arrive, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said they were welcome in part because they “could be assimilated easily into our country.” 

In opposing the elimination of national origin quotas in 1965, Sen. McClellan argued that allowing more non-Europeans into the country would lead to “still more ghettos and thus more and more acts of violence and riots.” Last week Vance echoed those words in his interview with Douthat, saying the Trump administration wants to limit immigration and refugee admissions because of “the level of chaos, the level of violence, the level of, I think, truly premodern brutality that some of these communities have gotten used to.” The Migration Policy Institute has repeatedly and persuasively presented evidence showing no clear link between criminality and immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, but the mass influx of a foreign migrant population can be a neuralgic issue for modern societies. In 1923, Congressman Cable claimed (without evidence) that 90 percent of the U.S. population favored barriers to immigration. Today, notwithstanding President Trump’s faltering approval numbers overall, he is rated higher on immigration than on any other issue. 

Top image: Immigrants at Ellis Island, NY 1913.